Joseph Leutgeb

• 1. A Month in Vienna

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  Joseph Leutgeb landed one of the best jobs in Vienna in February 1763. It came with what the record calls a "high yearly salary", inside the Esterházy family's musical establishment, then run by Joseph Haydn himself. A month later, he was gone, and no source explains why he left. Leutgeb, sometimes recorded as Leitgeb, was a horn player of the classical era. He lived from the 6th of October 1732 to the 27th of February 1811. He became a close friend and creative spark for both Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Almost nothing is known about the years before Vienna took notice of him, and the record only grows stranger from there. Why did a seven-year-old prodigy list Leutgeb among the people he missed while touring Europe? How did a hired horn player end up owing money to that same prodigy's father years later? And why did reference books spend generations repeating a false detail about a shop he supposedly ran? Those threads all begin, like Leutgeb's public career, in the concert halls of Vienna.

• 2. A Vienna Reputation

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  Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf recorded that Leutgeb performed in Vienna in the early 1750s, playing for Prince Hildburghausen. Little else is known about those early years, but his standing rose quickly over the following decade.

  Between the 21st of November 1761 and the 28th of January 1763, Leutgeb performed at Vienna's Burgtheater. There he played horn concertos by Leopold Hofmann, Michael Haydn, and Dittersdorf. Daniel Heartz called him "the most prominent horn soloist in Vienna, and evidently one of the best received players on any solo instrument."

  Heartz also suggests that in 1762, Joseph Haydn composed his Concerto in D, Hob. VIId/3D, specifically for Leutgeb. On the 3rd of July 1763, Haydn's wife served as godmother to Leutgeb's daughter, Maria Anna Apollonia, showing how close the two families were.

  Michael Lorenz later found Leutgeb's own signature on the autograph score of Haydn's horn concerto. Before the year was out, Leutgeb had already left Vienna for a new post in Salzburg.

• 3. Salzburg Friendships

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  In Salzburg, Leutgeb joined the musical establishment of the ruling Prince-Archbishop, working alongside Leopold Mozart. Later that same year, Michael Haydn joined too, as the new Konzertmeister.

  There, Leutgeb also became friends with Leopold's seven-year-old son, Wolfgang. On the 20th of August 1763, Leopold wrote home from the road with a list of people young Wolfgang said he missed. Leutgeb's name was on it.

  Wolfgang later joined the same court establishment as a paid musician, making Leutgeb his professional colleague as well as his father's.

  Like the Mozarts, Leutgeb regularly took leave from his Salzburg post to perform elsewhere, appearing in Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and cities across Italy. In February 1773, he toured Italy together with Leopold and Wolfgang. In Milan, father and son wrote home describing his warm reception, predicting a bright future for him.

  One of Leutgeb's trips to Paris drew a glowing review in Mercure de France. The reviewer called him "a superior talent", able to "sing an adagio as perfectly as the most mellow, interesting and accurate voice." Those Italian and Parisian triumphs would count for little a few years later, when Leutgeb's finances took a turn back in Vienna.

• 4. Debts and a Myth

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  In 1777, Leutgeb moved back to Vienna and bought a small house, helped along by a loan from Leopold Mozart.

  Five years later, in 1782, Wolfgang, who had by then settled in Vienna himself, wrote to his father about that same loan, still unpaid. "Please have a little patience with poor Leutgeb," he wrote. "If you knew his circumstances and saw how he has to muddle through, you would certainly feel sorry for him. I shall have a word with him and I feel sure that he will pay you, at any rate by installments."

  Leutgeb kept working as a horn player in Vienna for years afterward. He did not retire from performing in 1792, contrary to what some older accounts claim.

  That confusion traces back to a letter Leutgeb wrote to Leopold. Older reference sources twisted it into a claim that he ran a cheese shop. The real business was a sausage shop, run by his father-in-law, who worked as a Cerveladmacher producing Italian style sausages until his death in 1763. The shop itself was sold in 1764, and no such cheese shop ever existed under Leutgeb's ownership.

  The horn concertos written for him during those same Vienna years would end up defining his legacy far more than any shop ever could.

• 5. Mozart's Musical Gift

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  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart most likely regarded Leutgeb as his favorite horn player, since he wrote several major works with him in mind. These include the Horn Concertos K. 417, K. 495, and K. 412/386b, also numbered 514, along with, probably, the Horn Quintet K. 407/386c.

  All of these pieces date from after 1781, the year Mozart himself settled in Vienna. The concertos now sit at the core of the solo horn repertoire and are widely performed today.

  Mozart wrote every one of them for the natural horn, since the valved horn did not yet exist. Heinrich Stölzel would not invent the valve until after 1814, patenting it in 1818. Without valves, Leutgeb depended on precise lip control and a hand-stopping technique, placing a hand inside the bell to reach chromatic notes.

  That same demanding technique gave Mozart plenty of material to tease his friend about, right inside the sheet music itself.

• 6. A Joking Friendship

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  Mozart's mock dedication for K. 417 reads: "Wolfgang Amadé Mozart takes pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox, and simpleton, at Vienna, the 27th of March 1783."

  In one score, Mozart marked the orchestra's part Allegro while marking Leutgeb's solo part Adagio. It seemingly poked fun at horn players who tended to come in late and drag the tempo. A similar joke may appear in K. 412.

  The multicolored inks scattered through K. 495 are often read as another joke aimed at Leutgeb. The Mozart biographer Konrad Küster has argued instead that they served a real purpose, "to make some musical suggestions to the interpreters."

  Letters from the final months of Mozart's life suggest Leutgeb took the teasing well, and that the two men stayed genuinely close. On the 6th of June 1791, Mozart wrote that he had stayed several nights at Leutgeb's house while his wife Constanze was away. He explained, "because I had discharged the maid Leonore and I would have been all alone at home, which would not have been pleasant."

  Later that year, after the triumphant premiere of The Magic Flute, Mozart kept bringing friends and relatives back to see it again. In a letter dated 8th and the 9th of October 1791, he wrote, "Leutgeb begged me to take him a second time and I did so."